Monthly Archives: July 2013

Five years later, the executives that were in charge of Bear’s headlong dive into the cesspool of subprime mortgage lending hold similar jobs at the most powerful banks on Wall Street: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank.

The fact they were able to emerge unscathed from a financial crisis that wiped out $19.2 trillion of household wealth in the US and as many as 8.8 million jobs has become part of the legacy of the financial meltdown.

“The downside is very, very minimal for the people who decide to take risks in these institutions,” said Anat Admati, professor of finance and economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-author of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It.

There are so many people out there who made one mistake, or two, and their lives are over. They bought a house that was worth a little more than they could afford, or they didn’t save as much money as they could have maybe, or they counted on a job when a job is never to be counted on, and their lives are fucking OVER. They are never going to get a second chance.

Lots of people who haven’t made that kind of mistake, who invested where they were told and worked where their parents worked and came home and raised their families and taught school and walked a beat are screwed, too. Nobody’s giving THEM a second shot at their dream jobs.

Yet here come these dicks, who apparently will never have to miss a meal, because we didn’t think we should throw them in jail, and somebody else thought hey, I’m already going to hell, might as well hire Satan’s previous janitor to try to score some points ahead of time. I mean what the FUCK. If your resumé includes “helped drive the entire American economy straight into a cement pylon while laughing hysterically about it,” I’m sorry, you shouldn’t get an interview, much less a corner office.

Speaking of Bear Stearns and being catastrophically bad at your job, this asshole is still on TV. Somebody at my gym always has one of the TVs turned to his show, and it’s all I can do not to throw a water bottle through the screen because being that wrong about something, that decidedly wrong about something, should disqualify you from the conversation forever. Yet here he is, giving INVESTMENT ADVICE. And yeah, I know people watch him and they shouldn’t. But his bosses should also be concerned about roasting in the flames for all eternity for greenlighting him day after day.

Apparently the only people who don’t get a second act here are the ones who were right about everything. The ones who were right about the war, or the economy, or the Wall Street dickheads in the first place, are never heard from again.

North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory signed the motorcycle-abortion “safety” bill into law this week. When asked during the campaign as to what abortion restrictions, he’d sign, his response was one word, “None.” I’m beginning to think he really meant NUN and we all know where they stand on this issue…

How does the President intend to commemorate “Mission Accomplished” after five years of death and destruction?

Is every Iraqi a terrorist?

The President has said publicly several times, in two consecutive news conferences a few months ago, and you have said over and over again, we do not torture. Now he has admitted that he did sign off on torture, he did know about it. So how do you reconcile this credibility gap?

Would the administration agree to a referendum in Iraq to see what the people really want?

I assume that I’m not the only one enjoying the food fight between Sen. Aqua Buddha and Gov. Fuckhead of Jersey. Christie picked the fight over Paul’s “libertarian thought” and they’ve been insulting each other ever since.My favorite brickbat came from Aqua Buddha:

Paul told reporters after speaking at a fundraiser outside Nashville on Sunday that Christie’s position hurts GOP chances in national elections, and that spending priorities of critics like the governor and Rep. Peter King of New York do more to harm national security.

“They’re precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending, and their ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme — give me all my Sandy money now.'” Paul said, referring to federal funding after the hurricane last year. “Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not letting enough money be left over for national defense.”

How dare they stand up for their states in the aftermath of a major natural disaster. The nerve. Also, Kentucky is one of the states that takes much more money out of the federal kitty than they put in while Jersey is helping to support Aqua Buddha’s blather.

I’m really enjoying this family feud between the hawks and “libertarians.” It’s a debate that the GOP hasn’t had since the heyday of the America Firsters led by Bob Taft and the internationalists led by Tom Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower. Gov. Fuckhead, however, should use the term “isolationists” instead of “libertarian” because the latter has a positive connotation to the GOP base.

Who’da thunk that I’d be giving advice to Chris Christie or that Rand Paul would be channeling Steve Winwood:

Dr. A and I saw Fruitvale Stationlast weekend. It’s an account of a day in the life of Oscar Grantwho was, of course, the poor bastard who was murdered by BART cops on New Year’s Day in 2009. It’s *that* day obviously. It’s an excellent film that portrays young Oscar warts and all, trying to be a better person before his life was snuffed out by a stupid transit cop.

Oscar Grant is played by Michael B. Jordan best known, to me at least, as Wallace the lovable young member of the Barksdale gang’s crew in the projects in The Wire. Wallace’s life was snuffed out prematurely as well, but in his case by his friends and “business associates.”

You’re probably wondering why I called this post the name game. Seeing Fruitvale Stationgot me pondering film titles and show biz name changes.Fruitvale Station is a weak title for an excellent film. It’s the Oakland BART station where Oscar Grant was killed but unless you’re from Oakland, or super familiar with the incident, it’s meaningless and not terribly memorable. They obviously couldn’t call the movie Oscar because everyone would have assumed it was about my cat…

Speaking of bad titles for good movies, we recently saw a 1956 Cornel Wilde film called Storm Fear on TCM.Wilde not only starred in the picture, he was the director and did a excellent job in both roles. The title, however, is from hunger, even I though I *really* liked this noir thriller, I kept forgetting the title. If anything, it’s a much worse title than Fruitvale Station, but neither does a good job of describing or representing the films. Do I have a better title for either? Nope. I’m a critic, not a flack and I hope I don’t take any flack for liking Fruitvale Station and disliking the title…

One more name related note inspired by my little trip to the movie theatre. Why do fewer show people change their names nowadays? Using his middle initial is a good start, but a movie star should stand out and there’s only one Michael Jordan. A British actor named James Stewart faced the same issue back in the day. His solution was to become Stewart Granger. The other recent movie name that causes me confusion is the film director, Steve McQueen. There is only one king of cool and using the McQueen name causes brand confusion. Again, I understand wanting to use one’s own name but where the hell would Archie Leach be if he hadn’t changed his name to Cary Grant?

I point to research that shows young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness.

I talk about how the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to a list of rules, and how millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt.

Invariably, after I’ve finished my presentation and opened the floor to questions, a pastor raises his hand and says, “So what you’re saying is we need hipper worship bands. …”

And I proceed to bang my head against the podium.

Time and again, the assumption among Christian leaders, and evangelical leaders in particular, is that the key to drawing twenty-somethings back to church is simply to make a few style updates – edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving.

This piece so perfectly explains my lifelong hostility to Guitar Jesus Livin’ is Easy Mass, to which I was first exposed in high school by a very well-meaning pseudo-hippie fellow who thought if we all sat on cushions in a circle, instead of kneeling in a pew, that would make it seem less totally bullshit when he told us sex was only for procreation, not pleasure.

That kind of marketing is not only ineffective …

But here’s the thing: Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances.

… It’s also profoundly disrespectful to young people, who are assumed to be shallower than their older churchgoing counterparts. The older folks are there for the substance from the start, so you can warble elderly hymns off-key and mutter in Latin, but the young’uns have to be TRICKED into listening to the word of God. Right from the start, you’re telling them you don’t care about them, you don’t trust them, and you don’t really want them there but you’ll put the sermons on an iPad if it makes them FEEL better because you’re just that big a person.

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.

We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.

We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.

We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.

We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.

You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.

Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus.

No disrespect to JC or the people who genuinely do long for him, but I think more than anything people my age and younger want to be a part of something greater than themselves. We’ve watched previous generations either rise to their historic occasions or smash themselves on the rocks of their own self-interest, and we’d much rather the former.

We’ve seen what results when you find something to throw yourself into, when you find a cause or a way of life that’s yours, that you’re willing to grow and push and change for, and we’re hungry for that. But most of the traditional religious structures in America are interested right now in two things: Giving you somebody to hate and giving you somebody to vote against. Neither of which really fill any kind of void.

Give us something to DO, dammit. Don’t blather on about the Kingdom of God and how we’re all storing up riches in heaven. Show us how to make things better right HERE. You don’t need religion to do that, of course, but why can’t it be one way people get there? I mean, cripes. It’s not like there’s a shortage of poor people need feeding. For just ten seconds shut up about abortion and the great gay apocalypse and let people think.

It’s far less likely to lead them farther from the church than they’ll run on their own if you keep telling them the brains God gave them are only useful as hat racks.

Obama, a president who gets a lift from supporters outside the Beltway and wilts in the D.C. hothouse, is hitting the road for all the expected second-term reasons: to regain his slipping leverage over Republicans ahead of the looming debt ceiling battle this fall, and to refocus his oft-meandering message back on the economy, which is all voters really care about.

Yet as much as anything, Obama has embarked on this week’s series of policy speeches to improve his own ambiguous frame of mind and take a comforting spin in the way-back machine, like a veteran chart-topper revisiting smaller, friendlier haunts on a comeback tour.

Obama. Britney Spears. What is the difference, really?

That approach risks his embodying the Republican caricature of him as a rhetoric addict who schedules a speech anytime he can’t think of anything better to do — but his team is willing to risk the ridicule to change the Obama in decline narrative.

We’re four grafs in. Spot any actual facts yet? Tell me more about the Republican caricature, though, guys, because that’s a real thing, as is “risking the ridicule.” That’s on par with any actual stuff the president of the UNITED STATES OF JESUS GODDAMN TITS AMERICA might do.

Aides describe Obama as basically upbeat but restless, eager to try any approach to break the logjam that is threatening to grind his second-term agenda to dust.

Somebody went to journalism school for like a hundred years to get the chance to ask a White House aide, on condition of anonymity no doubt, what the president’s mood was like. Imagine that person for a moment. Then feel better about the contributions you are making to society.

But first, they said, he needed to clarify that agenda ahead of what promises to be a groundhog-day autumn of partisan warfare over the debt ceiling and deficits after months of lurching from what one West Wing ally called “Scandal-abra” — the Internal Revenue Service, National Security Agency and Benghazi controversies — to stalled policy pushes like the unsuccessful post-Newtown gun control push and the ongoing bipartisan immigration reform efforts.

Controversies. None of which, again, are actual things, but look at the way we presume Republican hissyfits are real, because controversies.

And whatever attention-whoring West Wing “ally” is lending credence to this shitpile, please fire yourself from humanity.

The most important message Obama sent to Republicans, said Goolsbee, was that times have changed: “We’re already cutting faster than we’ve ever cut before. The deficit is going down faster than it’s ever gone down. Do you really think that all we need is just more cutting?”

Getting voters to absorb that message will be a challenge.

Especially with journalism like this.

The staid stagecraft of Obama events — a guy with a tie standing in front of woo-hooing fans on a riser — gave the Knox College event a generic, perfunctory feeling on the cable networks that carried it.

Baton Rouge has been steadily growing over the last 25 years. Even though the Gret Stet has had a slew of Governors who claim to hate guvmint, the Red Stick population explosion is largely due to, well, state guvmint. The local constabulary, however, remain mired in a more pastoral, rednecky past and have never quite adjusted to the reality that BR is an urban area.Here’s the latest example:

An undercover East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy was staking out Manchac Park about 10 a.m. one day this month when a slow-moving sedan pulling into the parking lot caught his attention. The deputy parked alongside the 65-year-old driver and, after denying being a cop, began a casual conversation that was electronically monitored by a backup team nearby.

As the two men moved their chat to a picnic table, the deputy propositioned his target with “some drinks and some fun” back at his place, later inquiring whether the man had any condoms, according to court records. After following the deputy to a nearby apartment, the man was handcuffed and booked into Parish Prison on a single count of attempted crime against nature.

There had been no sex-for-money deal between the two. The men did not agree to have sex in the park, a public place. And the count against the man was based on a part of Louisiana’s anti-sodomy law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court a decade ago.

The July 18 arrest is among at least a dozen cases since 2011 in which a Sheriff’s Office task force used the unenforceable law to ensnare men who merely discussed or agreed to have consensual sex with an undercover agent, an investigation by The Advocate has found.

District Attorney Hillar Moore III said his office refused to prosecute each one of the cases because his assistants found no crime had occurred. After inquiries from the newspaper last week, he arranged to meet with Sheriff’s Office investigators to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court ruling.

The Sherriff’s office calls this policing, I call it gay bashing, especially since it involves an unconstitutional, outmoded law that only Ken Cuccinelli could love.

I hear the sound of law suits being filed. That will at least give Governor PBJ the chance to spout platitudes denouncing “trial lawyers” on his next foray to Iowa. Hmm, I wonder if he and Steve King are planning a cantalope party?

Then there’s the question of how HB 2 protester Jaime Leigh Tilley got chains into the Senate gallery and secured herself to the railing? How, Walker asked, could she have gotten the chains through the Capitol security? Simple, said Dewhurst. Either she had stashed them in the chamber in the days before the debate, or she had someone with a concealed handgun license carry the chains in for her. Dewhurst said, “If you have a concealed handgun license, you don’t need to go through the X-ray.”

So if you have a concealed handgun license, then you are presumed to be a good guy.

And you don’t have to go through security screening.

Because you have a gun.

And are therefore not dangerous.

What the TITS.

For serious, I HOPE this is how people are getting contraband into the capitol building, if only because it points out how absolutely shit-ass stupid this rule is. I’m sorry, if you have a concealed handgun license, you could still be carrying any number of dangerous and/or illegal things, so how does a license grant you the presumption of good will?

Leaving aside the entire gun debate, why should you be exempted from security screening? Why shouldn’t you have to put your gun, along with your watch and commemorative super bowl pen or whatever, into a dish and walk through the thing? If you’re flashing your concealed carry permit to get out of the screening, it’s not like the gun is a secret anymore. Maybe you don’t want security to know what KIND of gun you have? I keep trying to think of ways this makes sense and I’m coming up blank, guys. Help me out here.

Seems to me all this does is create a class of protected contraband mules, who can get anything in at any time. I bet that makes everybody who works in the building feel nice and secure.

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? It looks like the Wicked Witch of the West mated unwillingly with a Dunkin’ Donuts and then Willy Wonka designed some shoes for the offspring of that unholy union. I’m all for a funky pair of shoes (and some of the things this company makes are super cute), but at some point we need to stop what we’re doing and consider the legacy we leave for future generations.

Yesterday Athenae posted a video of the arrests at the Solidarity Sing Along. As a result of yesterday’s arrests a much larger crowd attended the sing along today and the arrests continued.

About a dozen officers would enter the rotunda led by one officer who would walk through the crowd and point to someone:

Other officers would then arrest that person.

The officers would lead the individuals out and to the basement where they were issued citations. After about 10-15 minutes the officers would return and more arrests would begin again.

The lead officer would walk through the crowd and after some time would point to someone and then they were cuffed and led out. I was in the balcony and found it quite creepy and chilling to witness this process of point and arrest as did those around me.

Point:

Arrest:

Point:

Arrest:

In a tense moment, a veteran was arrested who had been holding an American flag. While leading him out the flag fell to the ground. The veteran reacted by trying to go back to get it and the crowd gasped as officers stepped on the flag. Someone in the crowd picked it up.

Another arrest. The crowd would chant Shame, Shame, Shame as people were escorted out.

Officers followed by press and protesters as they lead one person out and towards the basement. They then formed a line to stop people from following. One man tries to talk with the police about what they were doing:

Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, watched Thursday and said the arrests are only driving more to join in.

“They had 35 or 40 people singing peacefully and quietly and they come in and use their thug tactics and we end up with 500 people here,” said Cullen. “If they keep arresting people today there will be a thousand tomorrow. I don’t know when they’re going to get it.”

When Boggs requested appointment to the House Banking and Currency Committee, she planned to use the position to further urban renewal in the New Orleans area. But she soon found another cause that would help her reshape the country’s social landscape.

Newly single, she suddenly encountered the difficulties women faced when they sought credit. “I had not been aware of the discrimination against women until I became an easy prey to it myself,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir.

Boggs realized that women could only get credit cards in their husbands’ names. If a woman divorced, her credit cards were automatically cancelled. Even a middle-aged woman had to get her father’s signature for a loan. Married women, even those who worked, could establish no credit history.

By 1974, Congress was set to pass a lending rights bill that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race and age. Boggs, however, noticed that women had been excluded. “I thought I should add ‘or sex or martial status,’ ” she recalled, adding that she wrote that addition on her copy of the bill and made a photocopy for each committee member.

Then, relying on her considerable Southern charm, she announced to her colleagues, “Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I’m sure it was just an oversight that we didn’t have ‘sex’ or ‘marital’ status included. I’ve taken care of that, and I trust that it meets with the committee’s approval.” It did. Her amendment to the Equal Credit Employment Act of 1974 passed unanimously.

The impact of those few words? In 1972, only 4.6 percent of small businesses(402,000) were owned by women. By 1982, women owned 23 percent of small businesses (2.9 million), the vast majority of them established with their personal credit.Today, 30 percentof all privately held businesses (8.3 million) are owned by women.

Other than her first campaign to succeed her husband in 1973, Lindy faced only one tough political race for Congress. In 1983, her district was redrawn to give it a black majority. A year later, she was challenged by then-former Judge Israel M. Augustine, the first black judge at Criminal Court and a beloved figure in the black community.

Alarcon, her campaign manager, recalls that Boggs never lost her composure during that race, even though her campaign team was scared stiff at the prospect of her having to run against a popular black figure in a black-majority district. One event from that campaign, he says, remains etched in his memory as a defining moment.

“One morning a longtime supporter who ran a small and no-longer-very-significant political organization came in with this ridiculous budget for his ballot,” Alarcon says. “He wanted $5,000 — and about that time money was really tight. Herman Kohlmeyer, her treasurer, practically had a stroke. I had the unfortunate task of giving Lindy the bad news.

“Lindy, of course, said, ‘Give it to him.’ We complained to her that it wasn’t worth it, that we were running low on cash, but she just smiled and said, ‘You have to remember that there are angels everywhere. You just have to look for them.’

“That afternoon we took her to a local housing project to campaign for black votes, not knowing what kind of reception she would get. Almost as soon as we arrived, dozens of women came pouring out of their apartments, some of them clutching letters they had received years earlier from Lindy, or even Hale. Several of them said, ‘Don’t worry Miss Boggs. We remember that you were always there for us. We’re gonna be here for you now.’

“She then turned to me and said, ‘You see. There really are angels everywhere. You just have to look for them.'”

Boggs won re-election handily, capturing more than a third of the black vote.

Now that she is gone, Alarcon said through tears, “We don’t have to look too far to find this angel.”

A man who wanted to prove he could swim across the Detroit River from Canada to the US after a night of drinking ended up prompting an international rescue operation.

John Morillo told The Windsor Star that Monday night’s swim from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, was “really stupid” and said in retrospect he shouldn’t have done it. He was cited for being intoxicated in a public place and released from jail Tuesday.

“I was drinking, but I wasn’t really drunk,” Morillo, 47, of Windsor, said Tuesday. “The thing is, I’ve been telling people I’m going to swim across the river for years and they’re like ‘yah, yah, blah, blah, you can’t make it.’ So, I don’t know, last night I just decided it was the time to go.”

Morillo said he regrets causing problems for authorities, including Windsor police and coast guard crews from the US and Canada. Three boats and a helicopter responded, The Detroit News reported, and authorities warn the river’s current makes a dangerous place to swim.

“As soon I saw the helicopters going by and the boats looking for me, I was like ‘oh, this is really stupid,'” Morillo told The Windsor Star.

Police in Windsor initially responded around 11:30pm, when a neighbor of Morillo called to say she had lost sight of him about a half-hour earlier.

Morillo made it across to Detroit, getting out of the water near downtown’s Renaissance Center, and was swimming back when he was found about 12:50am Tuesday by the US Coast Guard. During his stop on the Detroit side of the river he said people wanted to take his picture.

“There was one woman, she said she was from Windsor and she thought I was crazy,” he said. “She was right.”

Morillo said he was told that he’ll also likely be fined for swimming in a shipping channel, which could be $5,000 to $25,000.

I’d hate to see what Morillo would do if he were *really* shitfaced drunk. The mind reels…